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“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and Richard Ford would shake their heads if you were to read the novel as the dramatic monologue of a character whose optimism is merely an inversion of Richard Yates-style pessimism or a quality he’s been given to emphasise the ...”

“... Angevin lands now suffered the misfortune of successive rule by young Henry’s younger brothers, Richard and John, which in the end left the English monarchy reduced to lordship in twin island dominions, thwarted at least for the moment in its ambitions to be a territorial power in mainland Europe. It is easy to moralise about the self-destructive and ...”

“... Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the ...”

“... Richard Holt begins his book on French sport with two misleading observations. In the one, he recalls that when, in the course of his research, a pile of books on football or on cycling arrived on his desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his neighbours were bemused by his reading material. How extraordinary that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... around in a very characteristic way, and blurted out his answer in a fast, high-pitched voice. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I think I see exactly what you mean, and it’s fascinating, but really I don’t see why "suburban". Aren’t you trying to be too – specific? I don’t see why suburban has anything to do with it. I really don’t think it has.’ At ...”

“... in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the interior workings of tapeworms (cestodes, or endoparasitic platyelmia). Hard to make a bestseller out of ...”

“... to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency’. In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual to define ...”

“... Hayward, a successful businessman, of being involved in a criminal conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, the friend of the Rt Hon. Jeremy Thorpe MP. It was a serious matter when a book by David Irving was read as suggesting that Captain Broome RN, the commander in 1942 of the destroyer escort of a wartime convoy taking supplies to Russia, had disobeyed orders ...”

“... and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in government, that was ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... at the same time. Girtin, Sandby and their successors, Cotman and the tantalisingly short-lived Richard Bonington, captured as no painters before them had the most delicate effects of weather – clouds seen through other clouds, woods in a mist of rain – and, once aquatint was perfected, their work could be reproduced with tolerable fidelity. This was ...”

“... but resisted, the temptations that Lévi-Strauss is so caustic about, telling Sir Walter Scott that he would not render his travels more marvellous by introducing ‘circumstances which, however true, were of little or no moment, as they related solely to his own personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn ...”

“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”